African Human Rights Commission Hears Evidence About CIA Rendition and Torture Case from 2003 | Andy Worthington

The case was brought by the Global Justice Clinic, based at the Center for Human Rights and Justice at New York University School of Law, and by the London-based INTERIGHTS the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights and it concerns the role played by Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, as part of the program of rendition, secret detention and torture run by the CIA on Bush’s orders, with specific reference to the case of Mohammed al-Asad, a Yemeni citizen, who, as the Global Justice Clinic explained in a press release, “was secretly detained, tortured and interrogated in Djibouti for several weeks in 2003 and 2004 before being forcibly transferred to a CIA ‘black site.’”As the press release also explained:In December 2003, Mohammed al-Asad was abducted from his family home in Tanzania and taken to a secret detention site in Djibouti where he was placed in isolation in a filthy cell, interrogated, and subjected to cruel treatment. He was deprived of all contact with the outside world, and was not able to contact a lawyer, his family, or the ICRC. After two weeks, Djibouti handed al-Asad to CIA agents who assaulted him, stripped him naked, photographed him, then dressed him in a diaper, and strapped him to the floor of a CIA transport plane. He endured 16 months of secret detention before he was transferred to Yemen and eventually released without ever being charged with a terrorism-related crime.The first documents in this case were filed confidentially in December 2009, although it didn’t become public knowledge until March 2011, when, as I reported at the time, the groups representing al-Asad urged the Commission to “demand that the government of Djibouti ‘answer for abuses it committed’ as part of the CIA’s secret program.”

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